Background

I'm originally from South Shields, a town in north east England near to Newcastle. I studied at the Royal Grammar School (RGS) in Newcastle and that is where I found my love of Science. My academic background is firstly in Molecular Biology and Genetics with a BSc (Hons) in Molecular Biology from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Genetics/Bioinformatics from the University of Nottingham. I now lead the Scientific Computing Facility at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG) in Dresden, Germany. We are a team who provide bioinformatics data analysis, scientific software development and image processing services to researchers at the MPI-CBG and across the Dresden campus.

Expertise

I lead an interdisciplinary team with expertise ranging from the biological sciences through to computer science and physics. Managing a diverse team and handling many projects simultaneously to the satisfaction of the researchers at the MPI-CBG and the Dresden Biopolis Campus is a challenging yet satisfying role. My biological sciences background is essential for strong communication with the research scientists and my technical background and programming experience in Python, Perl and R helps me translate those research goals into structured projects for my team.

Our core bioinformatics team at the MPI-CBG have become involved in a wide variety of projects and are increasingly becoming heavily involved in projects employing Deep Sequencing technologies. Major projects include the de novo assembly of the S. mediterranea transcriptome and D. lacteum transcriptomes which formed part of a recent nature publication.

Our scientific software development team are focused on aiding scientists at the MPI-CBG improving the efficiency of their code in a high performance computing (HPC) environment, as well as dealing with the flow of image data from our SPIM microscopes, and creating tools and web applications for the presentation of big data to the broader scientific community.

Hobbies

I've begun to run again and completed the Great North Run 2010. I also enjoy tenpin bowling when possible and was a member of a league whilst in the UK. During my time at the University of Nottingham I became involved in conservation work in the Peak District National Park. For my sins, I also support Newcastle United Football Club.